A Changed Heart Part 72

"Come back to Speckport, dear old boy," wrote Val, "everybody is in a state of remorse, you know, and dying to see you. Come back for your mother's sake, and we will give you such a reception as no man has had since the Prince of Wales, long life to him! visited our town. Come back, Charley, and cheer us again with the sight of your honest sonsie face."

It took some time for Speckport to recover thoroughly from the severe shock its nervous system had received in the death of Captain Cavendish, and the various wonderful facts that death brought to light. It was fully a month before the wonder quite subsided, and people could talk of other things over the tea-table.

Cherrie, the bereaved, was safely back again in the parental nest.

Creditors had flocked in with the dead man's long bills; and when all was settled, nothing was left for the widow. But some good men among them made up two hundred pounds, and Mrs. Wyndham added another hundred, and the three were presented to Mrs. Cavendish, with the sympathy of the donors. It was a little fortune for Cherrie, though a pitiful ending of the brilliant match she had made; and she took it, crying very much, and was humbly thankful. Once more she tripped the streets of her native town, and her c.r.a.pe, and bombazine, and widow's cap, were charmingly becoming; and when the roses began to return to her cheeks, she was prettier than ever.

The town was quiet, and October was wearing away. The last week of that month brought a letter from Charley Marsh--a letter that was not like Charley, but was very grave, almost sad.

"Under G.o.d, my dear Val," he wrote, "I owe the restoration of my good name to you. I know all you have done for me and mine--my poor mother has told me; but I cannot thank you. I am sure you do not want me to thank you; but it is all written deep in my heart, and will be buried with me. I am coming back to Speckport--ah! dear old Speckport! I never thought it could be so dear! I shall be with you in November, and perhaps I may say to you then what I cannot write now. I am coming back a man, Val; I went away a hot-headed, pa.s.sionate, unreasoning boy. I have learned to be wise, I hope, and if the school has been a hard one, I shall only remember its lessons the longer. I am coming back rich; blessings as well as misfortunes do not come alone. I have been left a fortune--you will see an account of it in the paper I send you. Our colonel, a gallant fellow, and a rich Georgian planter, has remembered me in his will. I saved his life shortly after I came here, almost at the risk of my own, I believe. They promoted me for it at the time, and I thought I had got my reward; but I was mistaken. He died last week of a bayonet-thrust, and when his will was read, I found I was left thirty thousand dollars. He was a childless widower, with no near relatives; so no one is wronged. You see I shall not have to fall back upon Dr.

Leach's hand on my return, and my mother need depend no more on Mrs.

Wyndham's generosity. I am very grateful to that lady all the same."

"I believe I'll show this letter to Father Lennard," said Val to himself; "he asked me on Sunday if I had heard from Charley lately, and told me to let him know when I did. Charley was always a favorite of his, since the day when he was a little shaver and an acolyte on the altar."

Mr. Blake was not the man to let gra.s.s grow under his feet when he took a notion in his head; so he started off at once, at a swinging pace, for the cathedral. The October twilight was cold and gray. A dreary evening, in which men went by with pinched noses and were b.u.t.toned up in greatcoats, and women had vails over their faces, and s.h.i.+vered in the street--a melancholy evening, speaking of desolation, and decay, and death, and the end of all things earthly.

Mr. Blake, to whom it was only a rawish evening, strode along, and reached the cathedral in the bleak dusk. The princ.i.p.al entrances were all closed, but he went in through a side door, and looked into the side chapel for the priest. Not finding him, he entered the cathedral through one of the transepts, but neither was Father Lennard there. The gray twilight shone but dimly through the painted windows, and the long and lofty aisles were very dim and shadowy. There was but one light in the great church--a tiny lamp burning on the grand altar--a lamp that never went out by night or day. Two or three shadowy female figures knelt around the altar-rails in silent prayer, and Val thought one of them looked like Miss Rose. He knew she was in the habit of coming in the twilight here; but something else had caught his attention, and he turned away and went on tiptoe down the echoing nave, staring up at the choir. Some one was singing softly there--singing so softly that it seemed but the sighing of the autumn-wind, and seemed to belong to it.

But Val had a quick ear, and the low melancholy cadences struck him with a nameless thrill. What was there that sounded so strangely familiar in that voice? It was a woman's voice--a sweet, full soprano, that could rise to power at its owner's will. But what did it remind him of? A thought flashed through him--a sudden and startling thought--that brought the blood in a red gush to his face, and then left him cold and white. He softly ascended the stairs, the low, mournful voice breaking into a sweetly-plaintive vesper hymn as he went.

Val Blake trembled from head to foot, and a cold sweat broke out on his face. He paused a moment before he entered into the choir, his heart beating faster than it ever had beat before. A woman sat before the organ, not playing, but with her fingers wandering noiselessly over the keys, her face upraised in the ghostly light. She looked like the picture of St. Cecilia, with a cloud of tressed hazy golden hair falling about that pale, earnest, upraised face. Her mantle had fallen back--a white cashmere mantle, edged with ermine and lined with blue satin--and she sung, unconscious, as it seemed, of all the world. Val Blake stood like a man paralyzed--struck dumb and motionless--and the sweet voice sang on:

"Ave Maria! Oh, hear when we call, Mother of Heaven, who is Saviour of all; Feeble and fearing, we trust in thy might; In doubting and darkness thy love be our light.

Let us sleep on thy breast while the night-taper burns.

And wake in thine arms when the morning returns!

Ave Maria! Ave Maria! Ave Maria! audi nos!"

The singing ceased, the fingers were motionless, and the pale face drooped and sunk down on the pale hands. And still Val Blake stood mute, motionless, utterly confounded. For there before him, with only the moonlight shadow of her former loveliness left, sat and sang, not the dead, but the living, Nathalie Mars.h.!.+

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

"QUOTH THE RAVEN, 'NEVERMORE!'"

How long Mr. Val Blake stood there, staring at that sight of wonder, neither he nor I ever knew; but while it drooped in a strange, heartbroken way over the instrument, and he stood looking at it, powerless to speak or move, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and looking round he saw the pale face of Paul Wyndham. Pale always, but deadly white, Mr. Blake saw, in the spectral October gloaming.

"Blake," he said, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, that did not sound like Paul Wyndham's peculiarly clear and melodious voice, "if ever you were my friend, be silent now! Help me to get away from here unseen."

Some dim foreshadowing of the truth dawned on the slow mind of Val Blake. The ghost of Nathalie Marsh--the invisible and mysterious woman shut up in Rosebush Cottage--could they, after all, be connected, and was the mad mother only a blind. The question pa.s.sed through Val's mind in a vague sort of way, while he watched Paul Wyndham bend over the drooping figure, as tenderly as a mother over the cradle of her first-born. His voice too, had changed when he spoke to her, and was infinitely gentle and loving.

"My darling," he said, "you must not stay here. I have come to fetch you home."

She lifted up her head at once, and held out her arms to him, like a little child that wants to be taken. All the pale, misty hair floated softly back from her wan face. Oh! how altered from the bright face Val Blake once knew, and the blue eyes she lifted to his face had a strange, meaningless light, that chilled the blood in the veins of the looker-on.

"Yes, take me away," she said, wearily; but in Nathalie Marsh's own voice. "I knew you would come. Where's Midge? I am cold here."

"Midge is at home, my darling. Here is your mantle--stand up while I put it on."

She arose; and Val saw she was dressed in white--a sort of white cashmere morning-gown, lined with quilted blue silk. Mr. Wyndham arranged the long white mantle around the wasted figure, drawing the hood over the head and face. Ghostly enough she looked, standing there in the gloom; and Val knew she must have been dressed in the same manner on the night she so startled him and Laura. But Mr. Wyndham, who wore a long black cloak himself these chilly evenings, took it off and arranged it over her white robes, effectually concealing them, as he drew her forward.

"Go down-stairs, Blake," he said, "a cab is waiting outside the gates.

Come with us, and I will tell you everything."

Mr. Blake mechanically obeyed. He was not quite sure it was not all the nightmare, and not at all certain he was not asleep in his own room, and dreaming this singular little episode, and would awake presently to smile at it all. He went down-stairs in silent bewilderment, never speaking a word, and hardly able to think. Nathalie Marsh was dead--or at least some one was dead, and buried out there in the cemetery, that he had taken to be Nathalie Marsh--how then did she come to be walking down-stairs behind him, supported by that extraordinary man, Paul Wyndham?

The cathedral was quite deserted when they got down, and the s.e.xton was just locking it up for the night. He stared a little at the three forms going by him; but he was an old man, with sight not so good as it might be, and he did not recognize them. They met no one within the inclosed grounds. At the side gate a cab stood waiting; Mr. Blake opened the door, and Mr. Wyndham helped in his silent companion, who yielded herself, "pa.s.sive to all changes."

"Come with us, Blake," Mr. Wyndham said, as he entered and seated himself by the lady. "Rosebush Cottage, driver. Make haste!"

Not a word was spoken during the drive. The slight figure of the woman lay back in a corner, her head drooping against the side of the carriage. Paul Wyndham sat by her, looking at her often, but not addressing her; and Mr. Blake, in a hopeless mora.s.s of doubt and mystification, sat staring at the living ghost, and wondering when he was going to wake from his dream.

The distance was short. In ten minutes they stopped in front of the pretty cottage, from whose curtained windows a bright light shone. The roses in the garden were dead long ago, and only gaunt stalks and bare vines twined themselves, like ugly brown snakes, where the climbing roses grew. A queer figure stood at the gate--an ugly, dwarfed, and unwieldy figure, with a big head set on no neck at all, and a broad, florid face, and little pin-hole eyes. But the eyes were big enough to express a great deal of anxiety; and she flung the gate open and rushed out as the carriage door opened and Mr. Wyndham got out.

"Have you found her?" she cried. "Oh, dear! oh, dear! Where was she, now?"

Mr. Wyndham did not notice her.

"Get out, Blake," he said; and Midge recoiled with a cry of consternation at sight of Val's towering form. The next instant, he had lifted the lady out in his arms, as if she were a baby, and carried her within the gate. "Take her into the house," he said, sternly. "I shall talk to you about this again!"

Midge obeyed meekly--Val wondered as much at that meekness as at anything he had seen yet--and led the pa.s.sive girlish creature into the house. Mr. Wyndham paid and dismissed the cabman, and held the gate open for Val.

"Come in, Blake," he said gravely; "the time has come when my secret can be no longer kept, and I would sooner tell it to you than to any other human being in existence."

"Tell me," said Val, finding voice for the first time, "is that really Nathalie Marsh?"

"She was Nathalie Marsh--she is Nathalie Wyndham now. She is my wife!"

Mr. Blake fairly gasped for breath.

"Your wife!" he exclaimed, "are you going mad, Mr. Wyndham? Olive is your wife!"

"No," said Paul Wyndham, with cold sternness, "she is not--she never has been. The compact I made with her was a formal matter of business, which gave me the right to dwell under the same roof with her, but never made me her husband. She and I understand each other perfectly. Nathalie is my wife--my dear and cherished wife, and was so before I ever came to Speckport."

"Then, Mr. Wyndham," said Val, with gravity, "you are a scoundrel!"

"Perhaps so. Come in."

Val Blake took off his hat and crossed the threshold of Rosebush Cottage for the first time since it was inhabited.

"And your mother was only a myth?" he asked, as Mr. Wyndham closed and locked carefully the front door.

"Only a myth. My mother is in Westchester County yet."

Val asked no more questions, but looked around him. The hall was long, with beautiful proof-engravings, and lit by pendant chandeliers. There was a door to either hand--Midge came out of the one to the left, still wearing that anxious face.

"Now, then," said Mr. Wyndham, sternly, "how did this happen?"